This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals
There is a particular kind of modern madness, so new it has yet to be named. It involves voluntarily feeding your own emotional entrails into the maw of an algorithm. It’s a madness born of idle curiosity, and perhaps a deep, masochistic hunger for pain. I indulged in it recently, and the result sits in my mind like a cold stone.
Years ago, there was a woman. We loved each other with the fierce, optimistic certainty of youth. In the way of young couples exploring the novelty of a shared future, we once stumbled upon one of those early, crude image generators - the kind that promised to visualize the genetic roulette of potential offspring. We fed it our photos, laughing at the absurdity, yet strangely captivated. The result, a composite face with hints of her eyes and jawline, and the contours of my cheeks. The baby struck us both as disarmingly cute. A little ghost of possibility, rendered in pixels. The interface was lacking, this being the distant year of 2022, and all we could do was laugh at the image, and look each other in the eyes that formed a kaleidoscope of love.
Life, as it does, intervened. We weren’t careful. A positive test, followed swiftly by the cramping and bleeding that signals an end before a beginning. The dominant emotion then, I must confess with the clarity of hindsight and the weight of shame, was profound relief. We were young, financially precarious, emotionally unmoored. A child felt like an accidentally unfurled sail catching a gale, dragging us into a sea we weren’t equipped to navigate. The relief was sharp, immediate, and utterly rational. We mourned the event, the scare, but not the entity. Not yet. I don't even know if it was a boy or a girl.
Time passed. The relationship ended, as young love often does, not with a bang but with the slow erosion of incompatible trajectories. Or perhaps that's me being maudlin, in the end, it went down in flames, and I felt immense relief that it was done. Life moved on. Occasionally, my digital past haunted me. Essays written that mentioned her, half-joking parentheticals where I remembered asking for her input. Google Photos choosing to 'remind' me of our time together (I never had the heart to delete our images).
Just now while back, another denizen of this niche internet forum I call home spoke about their difficulties conceiving. Repeated miscarriages, they said, and they were trawling the literature and afraid that there was an underlying chromosomal incompatibility. I did my best to reassure them, to the extent that reassurance was appropriate without verging into kind lies.
But you can never know what triggers it, thats urge to pick at an emotional scab or poke at the bruise she left on my heart. Someone on Twitter had, quite recently, showed off an example of Anakin and Padme with kids that looked just like them, courtesy of tricking ChatGPT into relaxing its content filters.
Another person, wiser than me, had promptly pointed out that modernity could produce artifacts that would once have been deemed cursed and summarily entombed. I didn't listen.
And knowing, with the cold certainty that it was a terrible idea, that I'd regret it, I fired up ChatGPT. Google Photos had already surfaced a digital snapshot of us, frozen in time, smiling at a camera that didn’t capture the tremors beneath. I fed it the prompt: "Show us as a family. With children." (The specifics obfuscated to hopefully get past ChatGPT's filter, and also because I don't want to spread a bad idea. You can look that up if you really care)
The algorithm, that vast engine of matrix multiplications and statistical correlations that often reproduces wisdom, did its work. It analyzed our features, our skin tones, the angles of our faces. It generated an image. Us, but not just the two of us. A boy with her unruly hair and my serious gaze. A girl with her dimples and my straighter mop. They looked like us. They looked like each other. They looked real.
They smiled as the girl clung to her skirt, a shy but happy face peeking out from the side. The boy perched in my arms, held aloft and without a care in the world.
It wasn't perfect, ChatGPT's image generation, for all its power, has clear tells. It's not yet out of the uncanny valley, and is deficient when compared to more specialized image models.
And yet.
My brain, the ancient primate wetware that has been fine-tuned for millions of years to recognize kin and feel profound attachment, does not care about any of this. It sees a plausible-looking child who has her eyes and my nose, and it lights up the relevant circuits with a ruthless, biological efficiency. It sees a little girl with her mother’s exact smile, and it runs the subroutine for love-and-protect.
The part of my mind that understands linear algebra is locked in a cage, screaming, while the part of my mind that understands family is at the controls, weeping.
I didn't weep. But it was close. As a doctor, I'm used to asking people to describe their pain, even if that qualia has a certain je ne sais quoi. The distinction, however artificial, is still useful. This ache was dull. Someone punched me in the chest and proved that the scars could never have the tensile strength of unblemished tissue. That someone was me.
This is a new kind of emotional exploit. We’ve had tools for evoking memory for millennia: a photograph, a song, a scent. But those are tools for accessing things that were, barring perhaps painting. Generative AI is a tool for rendering, in optionally photorealistic detail, things that never were. It allows you to create a perfectly crafted key to unlock a door in your heart that you never knew existed, a door that opens onto an empty room.
What is the utility of such an act? From a rational perspective, it’s pure negative value. I have voluntarily converted compute cycles into a significant quantity of personal sadness, with no corresponding insight or benefit. At the time of writing, I've already poured myself a stiff drink.
One might argue this is a new form of closure. By looking the ghost directly in the face, you can understand its form and, perhaps, finally dismiss it. This is the logic of exposure therapy. But it feels more like a form of self-flagellation. A way of paying a psychic tax on a past decision that, even if correct, feels like it demands a toll of sorrow. The relief I felt at the miscarriage all those years ago was rational, but perhaps some part of the human machine feels that such rationality must be punished. The AI provides an exquisitely calibrated whip for the job.
The broader lesson is not merely, as the old wisdom goes, to "let bygones be bygones." That advice was formulated in a world where bygones had the decency to remain fuzzy and abstract. The new, updated-for-the-21st-century maxim might be: Do not render your counterfactuals.
Our lives are a series of branching paths. Every major decision: career, relationship, location - creates a ghost-self who took the other route. For most of human history, that ghost-self remained an indistinct specter. You could wonder, vaguely, what life would have been like if you’d become a doctor, but you couldn’t see it.
The two children in the picture on my screen are gorgeous. They are entirely the product of matrix multiplications and noise functions, imaginary beings fished from nearly infinite latent space. And I know, with a certainty that feels both insane and completely true, that I could have loved them.
It hurts so fucking bad. I tell myself that the pain is a signal that the underlying system is still working. It would be worse if I stood in the wreckage of could have been, and felt nothing at all.
I look at those images again. The boy, the girl. Entirely fantasized. Products of code, not biology. Yet, the thought persists: "I think they were gorgeous and I could have loved them." And that’s the cruelest trick of all. The AI didn't just show me faces; it showed me the capacity for love that still resides within me, directed towards phantoms. It made me mourn not just the children, but the version of myself that might have raised them, alongside a woman I no longer know.
I delete them. I pour myself another drink, and say that it's in their honor.
(You may, if you please, like this on my Substack)
Here's some salt for your wounds: Mentally stable young people who have children early tend to enjoy immense personal growth (whether they want it or not), and are going to be more energetic and active parents, than those who wait for a good time. You didn't just lose your counterfactual children, you lost a better counterfactual you.
Well that's the rub isn't it? We weren't stable, even if we were young.
We could have made kids work, at least if our own relationship woes didn't sink us. We'd just made it out of med school, and gotten new jobs, but we both were working hard to get professional accreditations in order. Getting into the UK, then entering training, so many milestones seemed unmet.
It's not like we couldn't absolutely afford it, I'm sure with the help of family it wouldn't have been too bad. Maybe.
At any rate, I do want kids, and soon, as opposed to "at some point in the future". Now the hard part of finding someone to have them with.
Why not with her?
It's a long story. One I could have penned ages ago, but was in too much pain to do so. The breakup was shortly before I found out that matched into psych, and that particular excitement kept me busy for a good few months.
We just weren't compatible in many ways. While it might be rude to label exes with mental disorders, I am actually a psychiatry trainee, so it does mean something when I do it (and I'm happy to pin several diagnoses on myself). I strongly suspect that she has borderline personality disorder (gets it from her mom).
In fact, I actually went through the diagnostic checklist using her as the example.
BPD women are popular for a reason, men much wiser than me have fallen prey before.
Pros:
She was kind in the way of people who cannot bear the existence of preventable suffering in a five-mile radius. Dogs followed her around like she was Saint Francis, except Saint Francis probably wouldn’t have had the cops show up to return the “rescued” dogs to their original owners. She did the illegal thing for benevolent reasons, which is a not-unusual intersection in that Venn diagram, and her worst fault with animals was that she loved them so much she forgot discipline exists, which is how you get a nippy little mutt and also me doing my best to be civil to the nippy little mutt.
Intelligent. She studied at a much better med school. Unfortunately, she didn't study when it came to our exams. I was grinding away like mad, but she wanted to tour London, take it easy. We worked at the same hospital, we'd applied together (even HR thought it was very sweet). I had a brutal job in Oncology, but one that paid well. She took ER shifts that were more grueling and somehow paid less, then used the workload as the reason she wasn’t studying, which - look, I told her so many times. I did the annoying, unromantic thing where you say, “There is a path from here to there that requires pressure now for autonomy later.” My repeated warnings that her preparation was insufficient to secure a specialty position were met with dismissal. The outcome is a matter of record: I am now in the UK, and she is not.
Hot. Great in bed. Even after our breakup, let's just say I wasn't too great at turning her down when she called me over. My ex employer wouldn't be happy to hear what we did in the doctor's room.
She was funny. People underrate how hard it is to find a woman who genuinely laughs at your jokes without that blank “gendered social expectation” delay. Most women are fine, often delightful, but humor variance skews male; sorry, I don’t make the distributions. With her, the jokes landed, and I felt like someone had finally tuned the radio to the right frequency.
Now the downsides, which ended up outweighing all the good:
She was very hot-tempered. She loved getting into arguments and then breaking down in tears. I'm a very stoic person, and I hate raising my voice. If we argued, I'd withdraw and give myself time to cool before coming back to make amends. She found this worse than me just fighting back. And boy did we argue. I think in my prior relationship, which lasted 5 years, we argued less over the course of half a decade than I did with her in a few weeks. It was ludicrous, it drove me nuts.
She had little tact. On our third date, I had to stop her from picking a fight with a bouncer three times her size, which is a good way to get banned from a club and a better way to get (me) punched. With parents and friends, imagine me as permanent damage-control. People like her shock the air; sometimes this is charming, often this is a thing you apologize for over dessert.
She was awful with money. Spent it like water, was always in debt. When we'd come to the UK, we always fought because I wanted to be frugal, and she wanted to spend money she didn't have. She failed that try and went again, borrowing a significant amount of money from me. I gave it gladly, but she continued to live well above her means, and took months after we broke up to finish paying me back.
Her politics were god-awful, typical bleeding heart lib stuff. To her credit, she did tolerate my heterodox and witchy opinions. I still want to go the States and hate the fact it's not an option. She had every right to try, but said she'd die before moving there.
Unironically watched the Crown and Bridgerton. I'm being unfair here, but I must mention that she'd always get very miffed if I categorically refused to watch along. To her credit, she did make we watch Euphoria, and Fleabag, which I actually enjoyed. I would have been content to have the two of us sit in amicable silence while doing our own things, but she wouldn't have it.
She flip-flopped on the idea of kids. I've always been confident that I wanted them, when I'm settled. She'd go from arguing with me over baby names to strong protestations that she'd never have any. She was almost three years older than me, which means fucking around and ignoring the biological clock wasn't the best idea.
My family and friends really didn't like her, though they tolerated her for my sake. They thought she was a gold-digger (not true, at least in my opinion) since I come from a wealthier background. They could see that she was driving me insane, and I can't argue, since I literally went blind for a bit because of the stress.
The highs were stratospheric. The lows scraped magma off the basalt. I'm not built for this, my heart can't take it.
After we split, I had flings, most of them absolutely insane women, some with people I might have stuck with if I’d stayed in India. In Scotland, I had a stable, but extremely boring year-long relationship. I ended it. “Stable but boring” is a phrase you say apologetically, but it names a real tradeoff: if you have a history of chasing fire, you will tell yourself that room temperature is death. I don’t want the fire anymore. I want the happy middle: someone who is fond, easy to return to, a person I am slightly more myself around. Whirlwinds make great anecdotes and bad homes.
I had a manic pixie dream girl; the dream had too much nightmare in it. Some lives feel like literature. Literature is bad for your eyes. Ask me how I know, or don't, because I just laid my still bitter heart bare before you.
(In exchange, please tell me something useful about places to visit in London today. I was eyeing the Camden Fringe, but not sure if it's worth the hassle)
Ah the BPD girlfriend. I'm not sure we've all been there, but I remember my turn. Two even! And it does seem to permanently fuck your scale for what a satisfying relationship can be. Leaves you chasing the highs they gave you, without the catastrophic swallow a gun barrel lows they'd inflict with their boundless histrionics.
The thing you need to keep in mind with BPD's is that none of it is real. There are only barely people in there. It's all for effect. They might as well be LLMs, making whatever mouth sounds (even with your dick in it) are required to get what they want from you. Be it attention, money or security.
It was off putting for my wife, when I first met her, to hear from my friends that my ex's were crazy. I think every woman is afraid of being pigeon holed as being "crazy". Sometimes she feels a little crazy, in that way I think most women struggle with the instability of their own emotions and the tides of hormones that batter them. And I'd tell her, back when this used to come up, "You don't understand, they were crazy". I'd tell her about the time one came at me with a knife because I was playing a violent video game with her in my apartment. Or the time one secretly started moving in, established residency, and then refused to leave when we broke up. Or the time one had a whole backup boyfriend primed and ready for her to dump her pets and her lease on, moved down south and then married a 3rd guy.
I guess my point is, detoxing from BPD highs is just like coming off any other drug. I do hope one day you can settle for "Stable but boring". Because you're entire concept of "boring" has likely been utterly destroyed. You're unlikely to find a normal girl willing to fuck you and flatter you the way she would when she was trying to pull you back in.
Then again, I mentioned BPD's are like LLMs, and once again it's thoughtless AI which brought all this up with imagined offspring in the first place. I'm not sure what the cure for illusions are. Weirdly enough, I've found 40K bullshit not terribly off the mark.
I'm not that cynical about BPD. As cases go, hers is far from the worst I've seen or heard of. At just about the exact same time, my best friend was having his ex throw dishes at him and breaking his MacBook in fits of rage, all while doing regular self-harm.
Neither of us were telling the other quite how bad it was, because we knew, as best friends, that we'd be obliged to intervene.
She didn't attack me with a knife, didn't steal from me, didn't cheat on me or anything remotely as bad. If she didn't provoke the fucking stupid and seemingly interminable arguments, that alone would be enough for me to accept her other failings. I'm hardly perfect myself.
I ran into some characters shortly after the breakup. I talked two people out of suicide, which really makes me wonder if they found dating apps after autocorrect switched away from doctor.
Hell, here's a rather detailed breakdown.
I meet crazy chicks inside the hospital, and crazy women outside. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if the medical definition of 'sanity' even exists anymore, or if the entire space of possible psyches has been claimed. I tell myself I've had really bad luck, and that I'm not Captain Save-A-Hoe.
(The ones who seem sane are all taken.)
Well keep in mind that various lesser versions of psychiatric illness (depression, anxiety, cluster-b coping mechanisms) are expected in the community and healthy as long as they are not excessive.
On top of that you have various cultural problems like the whole anxiety thing, The Last Psychiatrist's idea of generational narcissism and so on.
One of the big things that happens now is that certain mental illness adjacent or maladaptive problems are supported by society (like anxiety and cluster-b behavioral patterns). The underlying sanity is there but the maturation and cultural PUSH isn't.
In any case the old school psychotherapists thought fucking the girl would clear out the BPD if you stuck with it soooooooo.
Also keep in mind "neurosis" and how it has been evicted from the DSM but is still behaviorally present. That is 90% of "bitches be crazy" alone.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes. I agree. That is your problem. You should be.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Tangential, but one of my favorite things to witness is someone with a BPD ex posting something like this on reddit and having a swarm of BPD defenders materialize. Seems to happen without fail. "Um akshually it's a primitive defense mechanism and it's not their fault for behaving that way." I'm sure it's quite comforting to know it's a primitive psychological defense mechanism after being threatened by someone with a knife or had false allegations made against you or whatnot.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link